Net neutrality: now what?

Great Debates
101

Yep, that’s me.

I live in an urban neighborhood in San Diego, America’s 8th most populous city. It’s a comfortable neighborhood, with plenty of professional families, and with an average household income above the California median. It’s just a few miles from downtown, 15 minutes from the airport, is served by a decent bus system, and has multiple restaurants and bars within a short walk.

And yet, in this thriving neighborhood in a large, modern city, in the wealthiest country in the world, i have exactly one provider of proper broadband internet to choose from. One. For me, it’s Cox or nothing.

Time Warner Cable does operate in San Diego, but the city, in its wisdom, allowed the two companies to split the city geographically. If you’re south of the San Diego River, you have Cox; if you’re north of the river, or in Coronado, you have TWC. No price comparisons or competition allowed. I even created a map a few years back to show the distribution. As you can see, there’s a thin strip in Mission Valey that gets to choose from both providers, but for most of the city it’s one or the other.

In some areas of the city, i could check AT&T to price compare their UVerse system with Cox, but where i am the best internet connection i can get from AT&T is 1.5 Mbps DSL. One point five fucking megabits? These days, that might as well be dial-up. With Cox, i’m on their third-tier package and still get 50 Mbps (officially at least; when i test it’s usually about 30-36, which is plenty for us).

Luckily for me, Cox has been great in terms of speed and reliability, but their prices keep creeping up and up, and there’s absolutely nothing i can do about it, because there is literally no-one else i can go to. I can’t threaten to leave Cox in order to get a break on my bill, because they know that i have nowhere else to go, and when they raise my rates every year, i have to bend over a grab my ankles. If their service suddenly became unreliable, i’d be equally fucked. And now, with the end of net neutrality, they’re going to have another way to screw their captive audience.

102

Well, for one, the 'net has a major infestation of Fake News! Unbound from neutrality regulations, the ISPs would have the means to filter and sanitize the information that we can get, in order to exterminate this scourge and insure that we see accurate information.

103

Yes, and when it comes to throttling news sites, ISPs won’t feel indebted one bit to the party that gave them all this free money. They find it very important to be neutral, it’s in their DNA. :wink:

104

What on earth makes you think ISPs are the least bit interested in doing that?

105

I don’t see where they lose their immunity. They are still the beneficiaries of the immunity provided by the Communications Decency Act (which allows them to transmit porn, libel and slander without liability) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which allows the to transmit copyright violations without liability).

The FCC categorized them as a common carrier to subject them to the net neutrality rules. They are now going to remove that common carrier designation but they still get all the immunity they actually need from those two acts.

That is the way I understand it.

I’m not sure what point net neutrality serves. Outfits like Netflix already pay a premium to cable carriers to carry their stuff.

106

But you don’t pay your cable carrier a premium to access Netflix, do you?

The situation they’re addressing right now is somebody like me… I’m a cord cutter. I’m frugal. I do not need or want 400 channels of cable TV for $130 a month.
However, I’m happy to pay $59.99 for internet service, then hand over $9.99 to Netflix and $15.00 a month to HBO. I’m frugal, I’m happy, I’m reaping the fruits of competition.

Comcast hates that we can save money like this, so they want to shape the rules and traffic to their benefit. Oh sorry, your Netflix and HBO downloads suddenly got very slow and unreliable? Upgrade to our $25/mo “Video Freedom” package to guarantee your old levels of service. Don’t like it? Hey, maybe Google will lay fiber to your neighborhood in 2 years… which, by the way, Google Fiber has gotten a lot quieter over the past 12 months. Lots fewer announcements, a lot less cocky advertising. It’s almost like it’s hard to be a second-mover in telecom. Who’d have thunk?

And before you say “that could never happen”, please read previous responses detailing exactly where and when this has already started to happen. Ask yourself why the incumbent broadband are fighting so hard for the right to do things that they promise they’ll never do.

107

This is exactly why the telecoms want to remove net neutrality and why telecom friendly Ajit Pai is acting at their behest. They’re losing money to the cord cutters. Suddenly people don’t need to watch cable; they can sign of for Sling, YouTube TV, or Fubo or whatever. The consumer can actually get the channels and content that they want, which is disruptive to their 1980s and 1990s era-model of making consumers choose between packages. The telecoms didn’t care much about the Internet until it started competing with their core business - that got their attention.

What’s going to happen now is that the consumer, particularly the frugal middle class consumer that Trump and his blind, bat-shit loyalists blather on about saving, are going to be the ones to get screwed. Things like Skype, Facebook video, Google chat, and other free or dirt cheap communication will probably become more expensive. Watching YouTube vids will probably be pegged to a data plan, much like what people are paying for with their mobile phone carriers. Usage of sites like SDMB probably won’t change but for the things that have made the Internet what it has become over the past 10 years, there will probably be a cost for that. Also, if you’re a small business and want to promote yourself or your business, you’ll probably have to pay for that too.

108

I don’t want to see net neutrality repealed. I’ve looked for the best reason the ISP / cable co’s can muster, and this seems pretty close, from a Quora discussion on the topic (it echoes what HMS and asahi just said immediately upthread):

“…in many cases customers choosing OTT video (also telephone) services are reducing or eliminating their video subscription from their service provider. This is key…because virtually all of the broadband networks were built around a multi-purpose model…This matters because these networks were built on the assumption that the operator would get revenue from most subscribers for both or all three services [video, data, phone]. When many subscribers choose to eliminate one or more of those services AND increase their usage on the third (data) to make up for it the service provider faces a double whammy. I cannot think of a single large facilities based (they own the gear) operator that built around simply offering data and data plans are less expensive historically because much of the cost of the network is shared with the other service(s).”
I can understand the desire to charge “per bit”, ie rates proportional to data used. Is there a way to achieve this without the stomach-turning possibility of my ISP censoring content it doesn’t like? Or as Heracles posted in #103, the ISP gets a favor from the administration, and decides a little quid pro is in order, so it decides to throttle voices of dissent?

It’s interesting in the debate a few years ago with ISP’s objecting to no-blocking and no-throttling rules imposed by net neutrality, they (ISPs) claimed net neutrality violated their first amendment rights, ie their (ISPs) right to free expression were being violated ("Alamo Broadband, a small provider in Texas…argued that ISPs ‘exercise the same editorial discretion as cable television operators in deciding which speech to transmit.’ "). The FCC counter-argued the ISPs were “conduits for the speech of others; they are not delivering their own messages when they connect their customers to the Internet.”
[quoted portions are from this [arstechnica]
(ISPs don’t have 1st Amendment right to edit Internet, FCC tells court | Ars Technica) article]

I just can’t get around the notion that if net neutrality is struck down my ISP will be able to pick and choose what (legal) content they let me see. They are not a newspaper. If I look at a newspaper I expect the editors to have made decisions on what content to provide or omit. When I go online, I expect to see all (legal) content available, portal to the world and all that.

109

Comcast owns MSNBC. Why wouldn’t Comcast want to favor content from MSNBC, and throttle content from their competitors such as CNN and Fox?

Time Warner owns Hulu and HBO - why woudn’t they want to favor content from Hulu and HBO, and throttle content from Netflix and Showtime?

If ISPs were just, well, internet service providers, you might have a point… but they’re not. They are gigantic international media conglomerates with their hands in every cookie jar. The data service they provide is just a small part of the overall whole. They’ll be more than happy to raise their profits by deciding what content gets favored in their pipes. Guaranteed, they’ll start working on the infrastructure to do so as soon as net neutrality is killed, assuming they don’t have it already coded and ready, awaiting the day when it’s fully legal to do so.

110

Do you know that you can buy Netflix through your Comcast box and have it on your Comcast bill? The relationship between the streaming services and ISPs has changed. They are content creators and not just distributors. As with any given cable channel, Comcast (and other ISPs) need their content as much as the streaming services need their infrastructure. In a battle between the cable companies and Netflix, the cable companies will inevitably cave. Don’t believe me? Here it is from the horse’s mouth:

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/3692252734x0x924415/A5ACACF9-9C17-44E6-B74A-628CE049C1B0/Q416ShareholderLetter.pdf

111

Hmm. Good for Netflix. Pity for anyone else trying to be like Netflix or compete with Netflix who doesn’t quite have that market share. I mean, you do realize “Massive corporation with huge revenues can bargain with ISPs” is not exactly comforting in this scenario, right? It’s like arguing that a toll road owned by Toyota that charges extra for cars by different manufacturers is not a big deal because Ford can cut a deal with them. Sure, it sucks to be you if your car is a Citroen, it’s pretty bad for competition (because that road is effectively the road), and it generally is just a big fat step down from the alternative of not allowing that, but hey, at least Netflix will be fine, right?

112

(bolding mine). Yes, straight from the horse’s mouth, the only thing stabilizing ISP service for video streamers is broad existing popularity. Carriers are free to crush threats from entrepreneurs and unknowns and anybody not as well-known as Netflix. Who, by the way, got its start via the neutral networks of the US postal system and the broadband services of the time.

113

I like the second paragraph of that part of the letter:

114

Should we ban Amazon shipping faster than how long it would take to send the package by USPS ground?

115

No we shouldn’t. Luckily that has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.

116

I have absolutely no idea what this has to do with anything I just had to say.

117

How about: Should we allow Amazon to set shipping prices for all websites? Pay amazon $20 a month or all your eBay purchases will take two weeks to arrive.

118

Shipping physical objects is in no way at all comparable to internet traffic. Knock it off with the false-equivalency analogies.

119

Because it’s an example of a “massive corporation with huge revenues [bargaining]” something that a smaller company could never hope to match. If that is bad, why aren’t we banning everything that big companies do that make it hard for small companies to compete? What is it, specifically, about the streaming industry that needs regulation to ensure the small guys can compete with the big guys?

120

Well, maybe we should.